Bank Group Warns of Heightened Risk of Cyber Attacks

A financial services industry group
warned U.S. banks, brokerages and insurers on Wednesday to be on
heightened alert for cyber attacks after Bank of America and
JPMorgan Chase experienced unexplained outages on their public
websites.

A financial services industry group
warned U.S. banks, brokerages and insurers on Wednesday to be on
heightened alert for cyber attacks after Bank of America and
JPMorgan Chase experienced unexplained outages on their public
websites.

The Financial Services Information Sharing and Analysis
Center, which is widely known as FS-ISAC, raised the cyber
threat level to "high" from "elevated" in an advisory to
members, citing "recent credible intelligence regarding the
potential" for cyber attacks as its reason for the move.

The problems with the websites at the two banks came after
an unidentified person posted a statement on the Internet
threatening to attack Bank of America and the New York Stock
Exchange as a "first step" in a campaign against U.S.
companies. The posting said the attacks would continue until the
film that had stirred up anti-U.S. protests across the Middle
East was "erased" from the Internet.

It was not possible to identify the person who posted the
statement. Nor was it clear if the threat had anything to do
with the issues at either of the two banks.

Dan Holden, director of security research at Arbor Networks,
said that several U.S. banks were under assault by a distributed
denial of service (DDoS) campaign. He declined to identify them
by name.

An outside security contractor who was familiar with the
attacks said that they were "massive" in scope.

Denial-of-service attacks seek to disrupt websites and other
computer systems at the targeted organization by overwhelming
their networks with computer traffic.